The data-focused roundtable covered myriad topics, with AI and its impact on hospitality front and center.
them to see who’ s getting what and where we should be buying.”
Others discussed integrating kitchen display systems with point-of-sale platforms to analyze ticket times, optimize workflows and improve menu engineering— decisions that have traditionally relied on intuition.
Cariss highlighted the level of detail now available.“ Every day we have it by server, by hour, by meal period, by meal item. You know who’ s serving what, when they served it, how often they served it and, in some cases, to whom it went.”
Matthew Bright, SVP and head of IT at Davidson Hospitality Group
THE PRAGMATIC OUTLOOK Asked whether AI-driven transformation could arrive within three to five years, Cariss pushed back. The obstacle, he argued, is not the technology itself but the industry’ s ability to adopt it.“ I genuinely don’ t think we will move quickly enough as management groups or ownership groups. I just don’ t think we’ ll have the time or the resources,” he said.
Cost also emerged as a major consideration.“ There’ s a cost here,” Meek warned, sharing a recent anecdote where a couple of big companies used all their AI tokens and burned through their entire budget.( AI token pricing is a consumptionbased model where customers pay for AI services based on the number of tokens processed. In LLMs, a token typically is a unit of text, roughly 3 / 4 of a word in English.)
“ We need to build this in a way that’ s cost-effective for hospitality. Companies are willing to write checks— but not unlimited checks,” Meek continued.
Bright offered a more nuanced perspective. While his company’ s development cycle has accelerated dramatically, he acknowledged that industrywide adoption will likely take
longer.“ We’ ve gone from planning in twoweek sprints to daily sprints,” he said.“ But I also know we’ re hospitality. We’ re a mature industry, and change tends to be slower.”
HUMAN TOUCH For all the discussion about data and algorithms, hoteliers repeatedly returned to hospitality’ s defining advantage: people.
Clark said AI has already changed how he spends his time.“ Over the last six months I’ ve spent more time doing what I love— visiting hotels and being on the floor with the team— than I ever had before.”
Dana Cariss, SVP of revenue strategy at CoralTree Hospitality, searches for the answer.
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